WRITERS DON’T MAKE ANY MONEY AT ALL. WE MAKE about a dollar. It is terrible. But then again we don’t work either. We sit around in our underwear until noon then go downstairs and make coffee, fry some eggs, read the paper, read part of a book, smell the book, wonder if perhaps we ourselves should work on our book, smell the book again, throw the book across the room because we are quite jealous that any other person wrote a book, feel terribly guilty about throwing the schmuck’s book across the room because we secretly wonder if God in heaven noticed our evil jealousy, or worse, our laziness. We then lie across the couch facedown and mumble to God to forgive us because we are secretly afraid He is going to dry up all our words because we envied another man’s stupid words. And for this, as I said before, we are paid a dollar. We are worth so much more.
I hate not having money. I hate not being able to go to a movie or out for coffee. I hate that feeling at the ATM when, after getting cash, the little receipt spits out, the one with the number on it, the telling number, the ever low number that translates into how many days I have left to feel comfortable. The ATM, to me, often feels like a slot machine. I walk up to it hoping to get lucky.
I feel like a complete loser when I don’t have money. That’s the real problem. I feel invalidated, as if the gods have not approved my existence, as if my allowance has been cut off. We are worth our earning potential, you know. We are worth the money we make. Maybe this is a man thing; maybe women don’t think about this, I don’t know, but I think about it. I think I am worth what I earn, which makes me worth one dollar. Not having money affects the way a man thinks about himself. Last year I didn’t have any money at all. Five of twelve months last year I prayed God would send me rent. Five of twelve months I received a check in the mail the day rent was due. I was grateful at first, but after a while, to be honest with you, I began to feel like God’s charity. At the end of each month I would start biting my nails, wondering what account owed me money or whether or not I would pick up any writing assignments. There’s not a lot of work in the Christian market if you won’t write self-righteous, conservative propaganda. I write new-realism essays. I am not a commodity.
I wondered whether or not I was lazy. When you are a writer you feel lazy even when you’re working. Who gets paid to sit around in a coffee shop all day and type into a computer? But I did work, I kept telling myself. I showed up at Palio every day, and in the evenings I would go to Common Ground. I worked. I wrote. I drove myself crazy writing.
The thing is, at the time, I was writing without a contract. So I wasn’t really writing for money, I was writing in hopes of money. And when you are writing without a contract, you feel as though everything you say is completely worthless (technically it is, until you get a contract).
You can write all day and still not feel that you have done anything. A man needs to do some work, needs to get his hands dirty and calloused and needs to hammer his thumb every once in a while. He needs to get tired at the end of the day, and not just mind tired, body tired too.
I wasn’t feeling body tired, I was just feeling mind tired, and I didn’t have any money, so I wasn’t feeling like a man. I was in a bad place.
I talked to Rick about it. He came over to the house, and we were sitting around, and I asked him if he thought God really called me to be a writer or if I was just being lazy, being selfish, tinkering with words. He asked me if I worked; he said that everybody needs to work. I told him I did but wasn’t getting paid for it because I didn’t have a contract yet, and getting a contract was no sure thing. At best I was gambling. He said he didn’t know whether what I was doing was right or wrong. He said he would pray for me. I rolled my eyes. He told me I had a gift and he liked me, and God would make things clear if I was being a lazy slob. Imago, our church, is made up of mostly artists and fruit nuts and none of us have any money, so Rick said if I was going to be a writer, I needed to write a bestseller so that the church could have some money.
I am irresponsible with money if you want to know the truth. I don’t have the money to buy big things, thank God, so I buy small things. I like new things too much. I like the way they smell. Today I tried to go to Home Depot to get an extension cord. I need an extension cord to plug in a lamp in the upstairs den. I already bought a timer plug for the lamp, a plug that turns the lamp on in the evening and off after everybody has gone to bed, but now I need an extension cord.
We probably didn’t need the timer plug in the first place. I could probably have plugged the lamp into the regular socket and been fine. But when I saw the timer plug at Fred Meyer last week, I stood there looking at it, having come across it by accident, and I realized how very much I needed it. And it was only seven dollars. I need this for seven dollars, I thought to myself, this is very important. I put it into my basket and walked off, wondering what it was that I needed to plug into it. That, of course, is now obvious: the lamp in the upstairs den. I got the timer plug home and programmed it without reading the instructions, then I went to plug the lamp in but the lamp was too far from the outlet. I could not move the lamp closer without ruining the Feng Shui. I have this fruit nut friend who says Feng Shui is very important, that a room should be balanced so that you feel balanced when you are in it. I put the lamp closer to the outlet, and my fruit nut friend was right because I felt very unbalanced. So I would need an extension cord to go with the timer plug.
I only say all this to show you that I have a problem with buying things I really don’t need. I saw this documentary about the brain that says habits are formed when the “pleasure center” of the brain lights up as we do a certain behavior. The documentary said that some people’s pleasure centers light up when they buy things. I wondered if my pleasure center did that.
Penny thinks I am terrible with the little money I have. I was talking to her the other night, and I mentioned that I was interested in buying a remote control car, and she just sort of sat there and didn’t say anything. Penny, are you there? I asked. Yes, she said. What? I asked. Are you serious, Don? Are you going to waste perfectly good money on a remote control car?
“Well . . . uh,” I said.
“Well . . . uh . . . Miller, that would be a pretty dumb thing to do when there are children starving in India!” she told me.
I hate it when Penny does this. Honestly, it can be so annoying. She lives it though. She didn’t buy clothes for an entire year, her senior year at Reed, because she felt like she was irresponsible with money. She always looked very beautiful anyway, and for her birthday I bought her some mittens at Saturday Market for seven dollars. She wore them like they were from Tiffany’s or something. She always talked about them. They weren’t that big of a deal, but she hadn’t had any new clothes for a year so I think she wore them while she was sleeping or something.
Penny is right about spending money though. Penny is right about everything. Penny said if I were to save about twenty dollars a month and give it to Northwest Medical Teams or Amnesty International, I would literally be saving lives. Literally. But that stupid pleasure center goes off in my brain, and it feels like there is nothing I can do about it. I told Penny about the pleasure center and how I needed the remote control car to make the pleasure center light up, and she just took the phone away from her ear and beat it against her chair.
The thing about the extension cord is I was pretty sure I had one in the basement, in a box with some other cords, but if I looked I might have found it, and then I would not have been able to go to Home Depot. What we needed was a new extension cord, the latest technology, I thought to myself.
I put my boots on very quickly. The good voice, the frugal voice, the Penny voice started inside my head: Don, please, there are children who could use this money for Christmas presents. It’s August, I said out loud. What about environmental movements, Good Voice said, what about the rain forests that could hold a cure for cancer, a cure for AIDS. Tree hugger, I said to Good Voice while putting on my motorcycle helmet. You have a problem, Good Voice said. You’re a pansy, I said back. You’re irresponsible! Good Voice shouted. Shut your gaping pie hole, I yelled back.
The thing about new things is you feel new when you buy them, you feel as though you are somebody different because you own something different. We are our possessions, you know. There are people who get addicted to buying new stuff. Things. Piles and piles of things. But the new things become old things so quickly. We need new things to replace the old things.
I like things with buttons.
A writer I like named Ravi Zacharias says that the heart desires wonder and magic. He says technology is what man uses to supplant the desire for wonder. Ravi Zacharias says that what the heart is really longing to do is worship, to stand in awe of a God we don’t understand and can’t explain.
I started thinking about what Penny was saying and what Ravi Zacharias says. I was riding my motorcycle down to Home Depot, wondering if Penny and Ravi would make good friends, when I decided I was being stupid, very wasteful and stupid. I knew we had an extension cord in the basement, and I knew I was really going to Home Depot to get some drill bits or a laser level or one of those tap lights, and that I wasn’t going to get an extension chord but something else, something I would find when I got there, something that would call to me from its shelf.
At the time I didn’t have very much money, and the money I had I needed to learn to use wisely. Money does not belong to me, Rick once told me. Money is God’s. He trusts us to dish it out fairly and with a strong degree of charity.
I heard an interview with Bill Gates, and the interviewer asked him if he knew how rich he was, if he could really get his mind around it. He said he couldn’t. The only way I can understand it, he said, is that there is nothing I can’t buy. If I want something, I can have it. He said that Microsoft saved him because he was really more interested in what he was doing than how much money he had. Lots of rich people are not happy, he said.
Sometimes I am glad I don’t have very much money. I think money might own me if I had too much of it. I think I would buy things and not be satisfied with the things I have so I would have to buy more.
Jesus said it is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.
Rick says money should be your tool and that you should control it, it shouldn’t control you. This means when I want a new extension cord and I already have one, I should use the one I have and give the rest of the money to people who are having very hard times in their lives. This means I probably didn’t need to buy a timer for the lamp. Rick said I should be giving money to Imago-Dei, our church. He said giving 10 percent would be a good place to start. I knew this already. It’s called tithing, and somehow it is biblical. The Bible also tells the story of these beautiful people in the very first Christian churches who are giving all their money to the church and the elders are dishing it back out to the community based on need.
One of my good friends, Curt Heidschmidt, gave me a lecture about tithing not very long ago. It was strange to get a lecture about tithing from Curt because Curt is not even a church sort of guy. He goes and all, but he hates it. Usually people who go to church but hate it aren’t going around giving lectures about tithing, but Curt gave me a pretty good talking-to.
Curt works at a cabinet shop and cusses all the time and tells dirty jokes. But he tithes, sort of. He used to keep a huge jar on his dresser that was full of money, and when he deposited his paychecks he would pull out 10 percent from the bank. Cold, hard cash. He would take the money home and put it in that jar. The thing must have had a couple thousand dollars in it. I was over one night watching South Park, and Curt was griping because the cabinet shop didn’t pay him enough so that he could get the motorcycle he wanted.
“Well,” I told him, “you must have thousands of dollars in that stinking jar, Curt. Use that.” This was before I knew it was his tithing money.
“Can’t.”
“Why?”
“Can’t.”
“Why?”
“Isn’t mine, Miller.” Curt leaned back in his recliner and looked at me over the top of his beer can.
“Isn’t yours?” I asked. “Who in the world is storing their savings on your dresser?” I pointed toward his bedroom.
“Well” —he smiled, sort of embarrassed—“it’s God’s.”
“God’s?” I shouted.
“Yeah, that’s my tithe!” he shouted back.
I was a little shocked, to be honest. Like I said before, he didn’t seem like the tithing type. I don’t think he even went to church nine out of ten Sundays, and when he did he just grumbled about it.
“Well, why don’t you take it down to the church and give it to them?” I asked.
“I haven’t been to church in a while, that’s why.”
“Curt,” I told him, “you are the most interesting person I know.”
“Thank you, Don. You want a beer?”
“Yes.” Curt went over to the fridge and opened a couple of Henry’s.
“You tithe, Don?”
I just looked at him. I couldn’t believe it. I was about to get a lecture on tithing from a guy who probably subscribed to Bikes and Babes magazine.
“Well, Curt, I guess I don’t.” After I said this, Curt shook his head in disappointment. I started feeling really guilty. “It’s a shame, Don.” Curt tilted back a bottle as he spoke, punctuating the sentence with a post-swig burp. “You are missing out. I’ve been tithing since I was a kid. Wouldn’t miss a payment to save my life.”
“Am I dreaming this?” I asked him.
“Dreaming what, Don?”
“This conversation.” When I said this I was pointing back and forth between he and I.
“Don, let me tell you. You should be tithing. That is not your money. That is God’s money. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Stealing from God and all. You write Christian books and everything, and you’re not even giving God’s money back to Him.”
“Well, you don’t have to go making me feel all bad about it. You haven’t exactly given your money to God either. It’s right there on your dresser.”
Curt leaned over the big arm of his recliner and with a Jack Nicholson grin on his face said, “Oh, you don’t worry about that, big boy. That’s God’s money, and He’s gonna get it. I’ve never stolen a dime from God, and I’m never gonna start.”
I honestly couldn’t believe this was happening to me. I go over to Curt’s house to watch South Park, and I get a guilt trip from a fundamentalist.
Curt went down about two weeks later and turned all his money in to a church secretary. More than three thousand dollars. I started feeling so guilty I couldn’t sleep.
I met with Rick after that and confessed I was not giving any money to Imago-Dei. Rick had come over to the house, and we were lying about how much we could bench-press, and then I just blurted it out, “I am not giving any money to the church, Rick. Not a dime.”
“Okay,” he said. “Interesting way to change the conversation. Why?” he asked. “Why aren’t you giving any money to the church?”
“Because I don’t have any money. Everything goes to rent and groceries.”
“That sounds like a tough situation,” he said, very compassionately.
“So am I exempt?” I asked.
“Nope,” he said. “We want your cash.”
“How much?” I asked.
“How much do you make?”
“I don’t know. About a thousand a month, maybe.”
“Then we want a hundred. And you should also know how much you make. Part of the benefit of giving a portion of your money is it makes you think about where your money goes. God does not want us to be sloppy with our finances, Don.”
“But I need money for rent.”
“You also need to trust God.”
“I know. I just think it would be easier to trust God if I had extra money to trust Him with.”
“That would not be faith, then, would it?”
“No.”
“Well, bud, I just want you to know I hate this part of the job, ‘cause it sounds like I am asking for your money. I don’t care whether or not we have your money. Our needs are met. I want to tell you that you are missing out on so much, Don.”
“So much what?”
“The fruit of obedience,” he said, looking very pastoral. “When we do what God wants us to do, we are blessed, we are spiritually healthy. God wants us to give a portion of our money to His work on earth. By setting aside money from every check, you are trusting God to provide. He wants you to get over that fear—that fear of trusting Him. It is a scary place, but that is where you have to go as a follower of Christ. There are times when my wife and I don’t have enough money to cover bills, but we know the first bill, the first payment we make, is to the church. That is most important. If the other bills get neglected, then we need to watch how we are spending money. And there are times when we have found ourselves in that situation. But it works out. We are getting good at trusting God, and we are getting good at managing money.”
The next week I emptied my checking account, which had about eight dollars in it, and I gave it to the church. Another check came a few days later, and I gave 10 percent of that to the church, then I got another writing gig with a magazine in Atlanta, and as I deposited that check into my account I wrote a check to the church. One after another, I started getting called to speak at retreats and conferences that usually pay pretty well, and each time I would write a check to the church. Since then, since that conversation with Rick, I have given at least 10 percent of every dollar I make, just like Curt. And I have never not had rent. For more than a year my checking account had hovered or dipped just over or just under zero, and suddenly I had money to spare. I decided I would open a savings account in case some day I would get married and have a family, and with each bit of money that came in I would give 10 percent to the church and 10 percent to the savings account. I was actually budgeting money. I had never done that before.
But that is not the best part. The best part is what tithing has done for my relationship with God. Before, I felt like I was always going to God with my fingers crossed, the way a child feels around his father when he knows he has told terrible lies. God knew where I was, He didn’t love me any different when I was holding out on Him, it’s just that I didn’t feel clean around Him, and you know how that can affect things.
I also learned that I needed to give to the poor. My church gives money to the poor, but it was also important for me to give directly to the poor. I would go downtown sometimes and buy a homeless person lunch. I hated it at first because I always stumbled across the guys with terrible table manners, but after a while I began to like their drunken ramblings. Even though they weren’t making any sense, they thought they were, and that has to count for something.
We don’t need as much money as we have. Hardly any of us need as much money as we have. It’s true what they say about the best things in life being free.
For a little while, a long time ago, I was a minimalist. I wasn’t a minimalist on purpose, it’s just that my friend Paul and I had been traveling around the country living in a van, like I mentioned earlier. We eventually ran out of money, so we sold the van and lived in the woods. We lived in the Cascade Mountains for a month. We walked through the woods into a resort every day where I scrubbed toilets in condos and Paul worked as a lifeguard. I ate the food people would leave in the refrigerator after they had checked out. Mostly perishables. Ice cream. Fruit. Cheese.
I only tell you this because when we were living in the woods, we didn’t worry about anything, especially about money. After about a week I stopped wondering if food was going to show. I learned that people throw tons of food away, and there will always be plenty. I didn’t think about rent because I didn’t pay rent; the forest is free, it turns out, great property all over. There I was, living in one of the most beautiful territories in all of America, eating free food and sleeping under the stars. It did not take long for that nagging feeling of fear, the false feeling of security that money gives us, to subside.
I remember a particular midnight, three weeks into our stay, walking into a meadow surrounded by thick aspens and above me all that glorious heaven glowing, and I felt like I was a part of it, what with the trees clapping hands and me feeling like I was floating there beneath the endlessness. I looked up so long I felt like I was in space. Light. No money and no anxiety.
It is possible to feel that way again. It is possible not to let possessions own me, to rest happily in the security that God, not money, can give. I have been feeling that a little lately. Rick asked me how I was doing with the money thing, with the tithe thing, and I told him I was on the up-and-up. He asked me how I was feeling about all of that, and I told him I was feeling good, free, light. He told me not to get a big head about it.